“When she was first ill?”
John nods slowly. “She didn’t mean to tell me. You remember how she was, Elizabeth. The ministrokes?”
“Yes,” replies Elizabeth. They were very gentle at first. Nothing too alarming, unless you knew what they were. But poor John had known exactly what they were.
“She would say all sorts of things. See all sorts of things. Plenty of make-believe, and then the present sort of disappeared, and her mind would go further and further back. Kept spooling back until it found something familiar, I suppose. Just looking for something that made sense, because theworld around her had stopped making sense. So she’d tell me stories, sometimes from her childhood, sometimes from when we first met.”
“And sometimes from her early days in the police?” prompts Elizabeth.
“All things I’d heard before at first. Things I remember from the time—old bosses, little scams they’d pull, fiddling expenses, pub instead of court, the sorts of things we’d always laughed about. I knew she was adrift, and I wanted to hold on to her as long as I could. Do you understand?”
“We all do, John,” says Ron. And they do.
“So I would keep her talking. The same stories over and over again sometimes. One reminding her of another, reminding her of another, reminding her of the first one again, and round we’d go. But then...”
John pauses and looks at his wife.
“You say you don’t really think Penny can hear you, John?” says Elizabeth.
John shakes his head slowly. “No.”
“And yet every day, you come here. You sit with her. You talk to her.”
“What else is there for me to do, Elizabeth?”
She understands. “So, she was telling you stories. Stories you knew. And then one day?”
“Yes, and then one day it was stories I didn’t know.”
“Secrets,” says Ron.
“Secrets. Nothing awful, only little things. She’d taken money once. A bribe. Everyone else had taken it, and she felt she’d had to. She told me that as if she had told me many times before, but she hadn’t. We all have secrets, don’t we?”
“We do, John,” agrees Elizabeth.
“She’d forgotten what was a funny story and what was a secret. But there must have been something still working, a final lock on a final gate. The last thing to give.”
“The worst secret of all?”
John nods. “By God, she held on to it. She was already in here. You remember when they moved her in?”
Elizabeth remembers. Penny had gone by this time. Conversations were snippets, incoherent, sometimes angry. When would Stephen come in here? She needed to get back to him. Just get this done, and go home and kiss her beautiful husband.
“She didn’t even recognize me by then. Well, she recognized me, but she couldn’t place me. I came in one morning, about two months ago, you know, and she was sitting up. It was the last time I remember her sitting up. And she saw me, and she knew me. She asked me what we were going to do, and I didn’t understand the question, so I asked her, ‘Do about what?’”
Elizabeth nods.
“And she started to tell me, and she was very matter-of-fact. As if there was something in the loft and she needed me to get it down. Nothing more than that. You know I couldn’t let people find out what she’d done, Elizabeth. You know that. I had to try something.”
Elizabeth nods.
“We’d picnicked up on the hill a few times,” John continues. “It really was very beautiful. I’d always wondered why we stopped.”
They sit in silence, broken only be the quiet electronic beeps by Penny’s bedside. All that remained of her, like a lighthouse blinking far out to sea.
Elizabeth gently breaks the silence. “Here’s what I think we should do, John. I’m going to get the others to take you home. It’s late—have a sleep in your own bed. If you have letters to write, then write them. I’ll come with the police in the morning; I know you’ll be here. We’ll step outside for a moment so you can say good-bye to Penny.”
The four friends leave, and Elizabeth watches through the clear border of the frosted window in Penny’s door as John holds his wife in his arms. She looks away.
